Literary Connections Between South Africa and the Lusophone World

Book excerpt: Literary Connections between South Africa and the Lusophone World connects literatures and cultures of South Africa and the Portuguese-speaking nations of Africa and beyond, and is set within literary and cultural studies. The chapters gathered in this volume reinforce the critical and ongoing conversations in comparative and world literature from perspectives of the South. It outlines some possible theoretical and methodological starting points for a comparative framework that targets, transnationally, literatures from the South. This volume is an additional step to renew the critical potentialities of comparative literary studies (Spivak 2009) as well as of humanistic criticism itself (Said 2004) as South Africa and the Lusophone world (except its former colonizer, Portugal) are outside the spatial and cultural dimension usually defined as European and/or North American. In this sense and due to the evident geographical and socio-historical links between these regions, critical scholarship on their literary connections can contribute to unprecedented perspectives of representational practices within a broader contextual dimension, and in so doing, provides the emergence of what Boaventura de Sousa Santos called “epistemologies of the South” (Santos 2016), as it considers cultural exchanges in the space of so-called “overlapping territories” and “intertwined histories” (Said 1993).